Smoking pot is less dangerous that alcohol, which is giving Australia no end of trouble, so legalize it with controls, said that country’s top alcohol expert.

According to the Harold Sun, one of Australia’s leading newspapers, the director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research says marijuana should be legalized under strict controls because the social harm associated with it was significantly less than from drinking.

“It makes sense to legalise marijuana in a controlled market,” Robin Room told the Herald Sun. “We are in a situation where we need to look ahead. I think we need to have the discussion and it makes a lot of sense in terms of, among others, cutting down government costs to have a fairly highly controlled legal (cannabis) market and, while we are at it, tighten up the legal market of alcohol in the same way we tightened up the market of tobacco.”

Yeah, but what about the kids?

Well, the health professor said, in a perfect world kids wouldn’t smoke pot or drink booze but they do and “cannabis is substantially less than alcohol and tobacco in terms of social harm.”

In 2001, Portugal reduced the use and possession of drugs that have not been prescribed or otherwise “authorized” from a criminal offense to an “administrative” offense, or, put another way, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy, which can be refused without penalty.

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.